Page:The cream of the jest; a comedy of evasions (IA creamofjestcomed00caberich).pdf/98

 "I don't know about that; but, in any event, people prefer to read about the life they are familiar with."

"You touch on a disheartening truth. People never want to be told anything they do not believe already. Yet I quite fail to see why, in books or elsewhere, any one should wish to be reminded of what human life is actually like. For living is the one art in which mankind has never achieved distinction. It is perhaps an obscure sense of this that makes us think the begetting of mankind an undiscussable subject, and death a sublime and edifying topic."

"Yes—? I dare say," Kathleen assented vaguely. "This herring is really very good, Felix. I think you would like it, if you just had not made up your mind to be stubborn about it—" Then she spoke with new animation: "Felix, Margaret Woods was in Louvet's yesterday morning, having her hair done for a dinner they gave the railroad crowd last night, and of all the faded washed-out looking people I ever saw—! And I can remember her having that hideous brown dress long before she was married. Of